


Relevance Paradox

by shinychimera, Yeomanrand



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, Bonding, Community: holmestice, Episode Tag, Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, M/M, Magical Realism, POV Male Character, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Trust, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 21:33:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the Cross Keys Inn, the night they resolve the Hounds case, Sherlock and John find that their most dangerous fears do not lurk in the dark and the fog, but in the centre of their own hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relevance Paradox

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Book7BrokeMyBrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Book7BrokeMyBrain/gifts).



_In the adjoining room, the springs groan. Despite the unpleasant hour, John is rising from bed. Awake again, or also unable to sleep...?_

Sherlock hasn't even tried, hasn't undressed or gone near the quaint little bed in his quaint little room at the inn — he sits near the window, staring into the dark. Over and over again, his fingertips trace the faint grey bond-imprint crossing his jugular to the nadir of its former arc, just above his suprasternal notch. The point where the windpipe is most vulnerable, when self-defence is necessary. The concavity he loves for John to touch, if he's feeling sensuous. The hollow where fear and doubt reside, if he's feeling poetic. Certainly where he'd felt those emotions yesterday, cold against the warmth of the common room fire.

_Stop._

A bit worked up.

He came right out and said, 'I'm afraid, John,' and John had told him he'd simply got himself 'a bit worked up', before Sherlock had even begun to explain what he feared. And from there, everything had gone wrong and ever more deeply wrong.

_John paces; six steps...a board squeaks on the third._

But then, certain elements between them have been going wrong far longer than that.

_Stop._

Sherlock's fingernails dig tiny crescents of pain into his neck. The imprint (seared with near-painless intensity onto his skin one dark and memorable night, not long after Moriarty's game) had once seemed so stark and black and permanent. Proof, if any were needed, that it was _real_ , this strange connection that had grown quietly between them — from the first cab ride when John told Sherlock he was amazing, to the breath-stealing punch-in-the-gut moment when death strolled away from them alongside a midnight swimming pool. Proof that the leaps they'd taken some time afterwards, vaulting from kisses to caresses to coitus to collar, were not some post-traumatic fling.

The forces permeating the earth always _know_ , in some as-yet-unexplained way, when emotional bonds have become genuine and deep between paramours, and idiot sentimentalists (who call the imprints left behind by the kindling power _love-marks_ or _heart-brands_ or the like) insist that the presence of such a mark is the only measure of "true love".

But their marks are faded, fading, nearly gone, and Sherlock hasn't stopped loving John.

_Delete this line of thought. Not useful._

Nor does he believe John no longer loves him.

_A pause; two longer strides, two shorter to avoid the strident board, three longer to finish crossing the room._

Everything had been _clearer_ , nearly a year ago — Moriarty's explosive threat had brought into stark relief how much they depended on each other; how confused and inadequate everyone else was in understanding their unconventional needs and desires, the unique ways they relate to their dangerous world and to each other.

_Three, two and two (dash dash dash dot dot dash dash, meaningless), and a longer pause. Staring out the window, perhaps, looking east for the first tendrils of false dawn._

All-but-perfect clarity, the night John had tenderly taken him apart: Sherlock had offered John everything, heart and body, mind and sanity, soul if there was such a thing, and John had accepted, wrapping everything they were together within a strap of leather — and they'd both started at the flare of _power_ when John smoothed the buckle flat, searing the reminder into their skin. A black shadow of the collar all the way around Sherlock's neck, a black spot on John's left thumb.

A bit public, compared to the uncountable marks hidden in undergarments; a bit odd, compared to circles of blush-pink on the ring finger, or chaste sapphire lacing the palms and fingers of clasped hands, or a cerise lip-print on the cheek or neck or earlobe. Telling enough to earn them a few curious or knowing or disgusted looks, when Sherlock doesn't bother to shroud his imprint under a high collar or his scarf.

Less often, recently, with the black gone to less eye-catching shades of gray: battleship, slate, ashes, ashes....

_Motion resumed, two steps, two, and three._

Normal, for the marks to fade with time; highly variable, as much as love itself. Normal too, more often than not, for the daily actions and emotions of bondmates to kindle fresh marks to replace the faded, always unpredictable in form, fashion, and especially time-frame. No science has ever been able to predict the when and where, no ritual has ever been found to force the hand of "heaven".

But do new marks fail to appear because a relationship is disintegrating? Or do relationships disintegrate in the stress of waiting for a flare of proof that never arrives? Not an experiment he cares to undertake with his own bond.

_Turning back again. Settling into a rhythm, 6/8 time._

Sherlock drops his hands, fingers drumming paradiddles against the arms of the chair.

So many things dimmer, cloudier, in recent months. Since the entrance of The Woman, certainly, but they are not living some puerile tale of straying hearts or divided loyalties — it's in her nature to sow jealousy and chaos but, as unsettling as she may have been in close proximity, Sherlock never wanted anything more than to impress a mind as clever as his own.

No, many other deep-seated complications have become evident, in the months-long unspooling of fracas and fiasco that The Woman and Moriarty have dispensed. Shared passions or no, he and John have had days and weeks of short tempers and shorter conversations, muddy misunderstandings and crossed conclusions, a bipolar playground of mood swings and attitude slides when they don't have a task to align them in the same direction. This is nothing so simple as jealousy.

_I need a case!_

Stop.

_Dash dash dot dot dash dash dash._

Sherlock stands abruptly, the armchair barks against the floor, and he strides through the dark to the door between their rooms.

Dozens of good reasons to wait until morning (most of all the damnable mind-twisting drug they'd inhaled again in that damnable hollow), all of which had seemed logical four hours ago and none of which are able to stop him reaching for the doorknob.

Alerted by the sound of wood-on-wood, John opens the door before Sherlock can reach it, but he stands firmly athwart the brightly-lit entry, arms folding across his chest. Registering his objection, because he's hopeless that way.

"This is ridiculous," Sherlock says, blinking the brief hemeralopia from his night-adapted eyes. "We're both awake."

John shakes his head, steps back from the doorway — foresight regarding Sherlock's actions if he doesn't, combined with consideration for those who are slumbering (Lestrade sleeping it off in room four, the fisherman's mother in three). John paces back to the window, left index finger jittering over the ashen mark on his thumb, and Sherlock's eyes narrow. The duvet and John's pyjamas (the laurel-green flannel ones, sublimely soft to the fingertips) are rumpled, but he shows no sign that he's slept, nor that he can be coaxed back into the bed, platonically or otherwise.

He pivots back to face Sherlock, eyes sweeping the room (appalling watercolour of Bellever Tor, door to the en suite ajar, lights on in there as well) before his gaze settles on Sherlock's face. Even with the fear-drug lingering in his system, he's far too tense —

A bit worked up.

Sherlock crosses to the bedside cupboard, gently pours a cup of water from a pitcher damp with tepid condensation, cold about four hours ago. He extends it in John's direction (smooth gesture, no sharp moves to key him up further).

John glares at it, warily.

_Icy constriction in the hollow of his throat._ "No sugar."

A twitch that might be meant as a smile, lost almost immediately. But John does step over to him, accepts the cup and, watching Sherlock's face, takes a sip. Rather than watch him obsessively in return, which can raise John's hackles at the best of times, he pours another cup for himself. A little late to make a show of tasting for his wary king, but he doesn't think a small demonstration of good faith will go astray. And some of the tension does go out of John's frame when Sherlock takes his own swallow.

"Thirsty work, brooding in the dark."

John doesn't quite roll his eyes, pointedly indicates the lamp without ever looking at it. "Awake does not necessarily mean ready to discuss."

_I meant me, of course,_ Sherlock says with his eyebrow. Aloud, he agrees. "No. But we might as well be unable to sleep together, yes?"

John's lips twist, the double-entendre as unwelcome as it was inadvertent. He finishes the water and comes closer to set the cup down, a faint hint of the forgotten limp hitching his stride. Sherlock frowns again, searching the telltale tilt of pelvis and shoulders for other signs of resurrected pain.

John stiffens under his scrutiny; fatigue, frustration highlighted in the planes of his face, casting shadows of some more difficult-to-define emotion before he tries to hide his tells once more.

Sherlock's own worry and frustration sputter beneath the surface; he hates it when John withdraws like this, withholds himself. He did it when he first agreed to the flatshare, wary of Sherlock's incessant perception, and then he didn't, and now he's doing it again.

_Stop, stop..._

Slowly, Sherlock places his cup so that the tangent line of its base aligns precisely with the back edge of the decorative half-blind dovetail joinery on the cabinet. He lifts his chin, swallows three times, trying to force down the tightness threatening to invade his jaw, and still doesn't manage to prevent his ( _irrational!_ ) preoccupations from bubbling over.

"Do you still care for me?" _substitution: desire, need, love. subtext: want to stay with me?_

John looks up at him, eyes round and startled. "What kind of daft question is that?"

Sherlock pivots away, raking hands into his hair. _Not now, not now!_

"The sort I shouldn't be asking aloud. But I don't _know_ anymore."

A sharp exhale, John's hand heavy on his bicep. "Look at me. _Look_ at me, Sherlock, because that's all the reassurance I've got for you right now."

He turns, looking down at John, chest to chest at close quarters. Back military-rigid. Hair rumpled, lightly laced with sweat. Eyes a harried hazel mess of John-love, yes, but also John-anger and John-forbearance and John-exasperation. Lines in his face hardened, deepened; weariness that would be too easy to interpret as purely stressful, physical, but some things in the Book of John Sherlock has learned to read too well — he's weary _of_ Sherlock at this moment.

Sherlock opens his mouth, pauses, draws a deeper breath, pauses, storms ahead. "You knew I was difficult, I'm always going to be difficult, I don't want to be difficult for you but I am. But I am _yours_."

A mild, inscrutable blink. "I don't doubt that."

"Then what _do_ you doubt?"

"It's not _my_ doubt that's the problem!" The words sting; John's chin drops and he paces back to the casement window.

"I don't doubt _you_ ," Sherlock lashes back, fighting to keep his voice from rising. "If I did, I would never have risked the experiment with the sugar."

"You could have asked me." John faces Sherlock, puts his back to the wall (not the glass).

"Not without — "

"You didn't have to give me any _details_. But offering me the coffee —" He cuts himself off, throws his hands in the air. "You were being you."

"I'm always being me."

"No, you were being the 'you' you are with everyone _else_. You manipulated me, rather than trusting you could say 'I need you to be my guinea pig, for the case.'"

Sherlock's mouth opens on a protest, but John holds up a warding finger.

"Don't. If you'd thought about it at all while you were charging off to raid Henry's sugar jar, you could have found a way to let me know without compromising your _experiment_."

Sherlock shakes his head, at a loss for half a second — he _can't_ think of any way he could have warned John something was coming without warning him something was coming. Maybe he could have if he'd tried, but that's not the most pressing point at this moment —

"I manipulate you all the time. You manipulate _me_ all the time."

"If I do, it's because you often don't leave me a whole lot of bloody choice." A harsh whisper, barely restrained. "And 'eliciting desired behaviour' when we both know what I'm doing is different from _lying_ to me with... with great mournful kitten eyes."

The drug, Sherlock knows it's the drug, loosening tempers and tongues ( _amplifying fear and aggression_ ), but his throat clenches all the same at the angry hurt in John's eyes. John straightens up with a grimace, pulling hard on the reins of his self-control. Brings his hand to his face and pinches at his temples with forefinger and thumb, dragging a hard breath in through his nose. Continues, voice more measured but body language still shouting.

"Look. Drugging my coffee, Ms Adler, Moriarty, the bloody _cabbie_ , it's all the same — _you_ decide what needs doing, you fuck off and do it, and to _hell_ with the rest of us."

"That — it's never been about not trusting you, John. I thought it was about you trusting me. Except..." Sherlock shakes his head, lips parting, heart pounding; his nested array of memories (thousands of moments, their last fifteen months) perturbs wildly and then simplifies again — John's multifarious mysterious behaviours unfolding like fractal origami. "Except...you don't anymore."

John drops his hand from his face with terrible finality, and his eyes are empty of all but the world-weary deadness they'd carried the day their worlds collided at Barts. Icy fear shakes Sherlock to the bone, the same buffeting, bewildering fear that gripped him in front of the fireplace, made him gulp Scotch from trembling crystal in a trembling hand.

"I've trusted you since Angelo handed me my cane, Sherlock. I still do, if you'd just _let_ me." A deep ragged breath, and John's despair finally slips free of his compulsive stoicism. "It can be very lonely, being your lover."

Small, quiet words, falling into Sherlock's deep reservoir of cause-and-effect, setting off echoes of inadequacy and self-reproach, ripples of slowing time and heightened awareness: within every crinkled line narrowing John's eyes, every twitch of panic and dismay he can no longer quite contain on hearing his bête noire spoken aloud, Sherlock sees accreted traces of misery, yearning, previously mal-interpreted disaffections.

Sherlock's hand lifts, thumb and fingers half-circling his throat, the pulse beneath the imprint racing pointlessly to nowhere (Why have adrenaline reactions to loss? Not a survival trait, not an advantage, not something he can...) He's not losing John, he's not _lost_ John, not yet, this is _different_ from what he'd felt (never wants to feel again) standing over The Woman's body on a slab....

Not so very different.

_Stop, stop, stop. Fear and stimulus — the small, the remote, the unthinkable, magnified, amplified, feeding back upon, feeding on, gnawing at its own flesh._

Taking refuge in pure logic, keeping his thoughts strictly on the case, providing no stimulus from his private life for the drug to distort: exactly what he's been trying to do, since his pre-dawn realisation that yesterday's fear (grit on the lens, doubting his senses, losing his mind) had been exaggerated by some narcotic.

Unwittingly excluding the most important data from his decision.

_If you'd just_ let _me_....

Elongated seconds stretching around him, John waiting with red-edged eyes and familiar patience for the whirlwind of thoughts behind Sherlock's flickering gaze to settle.

_And why would you listen to me? I'm just your friend._

Sherlock lowers his chin, reaches out slowly until his fingertips just brush the crest of John's cheekbone, watches John's eyes startle, track, harden: doesn't want Sherlock to evade the issue, now that it's out in the open; can't permit the enchantment of touch to soften him into a forgiveness Sherlock hasn't earned; won't allow Sherlock to think this is a proper prelude to an apology.

He's not apologising ( _to-morrow shall I beg leave_ ). All the reasons for sidestepping the pitfalls of language are still sound. But Sherlock must amend his oversight.

He drags his nails back against John's cheek, the rim of his ear, into his hair, cups the nape of his neck; the full subtext already there in his mind, in his eyes, but for once no ready words fall to his tongue.

John shifts his weight toward the back of his feet, and Sherlock grips a little tighter, lips parted around vital words that still won't come: to offer, to ask, to _allow_.

_Subtext: Trust me._

John's gaze traces from Sherlock's mouth back up to his eyes for an eternity, a whirlwind of his own spinning somewhere inside, until his tongue teases his lower lip and he settles again. A faint deepening of crow's feet and the lines on his forehead. A hesitation of trust before he yields, with a quirk of the eyebrow, softening from stone to flesh beneath Sherlock's cupping palm.

Sherlock holds John's head, lifts his other forefinger to touch the centre of John's lip. Wills him, with gesture and gaze, to leave words and argument in abeyance for now.

Committed, John sways closer to Sherlock, body taking the initiative while his recalcitrant mind remains one step behind, still struggling to maintain a poise that no longer matters.

So many times John has demonstrated his own form of whip-sharp perception; known, without being told, when Sherlock needs his frustration transmuted to focus, distraction to calm, mania to peace. Known, without being asked, how to tie him up, tie him down until his rocketing mind runs smooth and placid. How to still him with sensation.

John will never ask, Sherlock realises.

Both hands in bronze-fine hair, Sherlock holds John's gaze, shifts their weight until their feet step in tandem toward the bed until calf touches bedframe and John's ready (situational awareness, lower centre of gravity) to be eased down onto the sheets.

Sherlock doesn't fool himself that he's banished John's trust issues or frustration just by surprising him — but by changing the landscape so drastically, he's at least brought John back to his most stunning strength: the blank page, the willingness to cooperate without yet understanding, the flexibility to wait and see where Sherlock will take him now they've veered off the beaten (broken) path.

The beginning of trust, if not the thing itself.

❧

The bright room holds in their slowing breaths. Sherlock drapes like a blanket along John's back, their fingers twined, warmth seeping back and forth in the quiet stillness.

For a few minutes, Sherlock dares to hope for sleep, one of those sweet, gratifying moments when pleasure trumps the need to push himself to exhaustion to silence his brain, but too much has been laid bare, he has too much to consider and reconsider. John needs sleep, will need space to do his own considering. With practised care, Sherlock pulls away to slide out of the bed.

John makes one of his uncategorizable noises and rolls to his back, following. His fingers close around the underside of Sherlock's wrist, the heels of their hands just touching.

"Sherlock," he says, hoarse from holding back his cries and therefore somewhat gruff. He clears his throat.

Sherlock squeezes John's wrist in return, reluctant and regretful.

"Stay. Please."

_Stay with me. Be here for me. Protect me from nightmares, shield me from loneliness._

_Yours._

An increase in the warmth of John's skin beneath his hand, of John's hand against his skin. No more warning than that before a shimmer spirals up his spine. Different, from the first time, and yet the same subtle power locking their grips in place. John's eyes wide and round, surprise and pleasure and, yes, relief — his own eyes must reflect the same.

They will not, cannot, do not wish to release each other.

_**Whole**_ , the bond says through vein and artery, synapse and receptor. _**Together. Right.**_ Their pulses in thumbs and fingertips, in wrists, universal and simultaneous.

_Yours_ , they silently affirm. _Mine. Ours._

The brightness falls from the air; John raises up on his elbow and tugs gently. Sherlock follows him down, kisses him softly. Allows John to tuck himself against Sherlock's side, shoulder as pillow, places his wrist so John can examine the new mark, fingertips examining the crimson print of his palm on Sherlock's pale skin. When John is satisfied, Sherlock draws John's wrist up, explores the matching imprint of his long fingers with touch and a kiss.

Sherlock sets John's hand over his ribcage, over his heart, closes his eyes and evens his breathing until he feels John relax against him, limbs heavy and cooling in second-stage sleep.

Only then, in the first pale light of dawn, does Sherlock look wonderingly at his own imprint: red as rubies, and apples, and blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock internally quotes from _Hamlet_ , IV 7, Claudius reading from Hamlet's letter.
> 
> Wikipedia on the [relevance paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_paradox).
> 
> Reference is made to Thomas Nashe's [A Litany in Time of Plague](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16125).
> 
> Many thanks to [swissmarg](http://swissmarg.livejournal.com/) and [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk) for their beta and Britpicking. Any remaining errors belong to the authors and the authors alone.
> 
> Also thanks to [Book7BrokeMyBrain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Book7BrokeMyBrain) for the prompts (we ran with a combination of several), and for the [Holmestice](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/) mods for another wonderful fest.


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